I saw Grey Gardens for the first time during one of my high school summers--when the most stressful part of my too-humid-to-move days was how to switch between episodes of Dawson's Creek on TBS and The OC/One Tree Hill on Soapnet without missing the plot-heavy segments of each respective teen melodrama. I must have taken a break to scroll through Comcast On Demand movies, where I stumbled upon Grey Gardens, which I immediately purchased because it had eccentric written all over it.
The TV movie, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, is based on the original 1975 documentary of the same name that uncovered the squalid and isolated lives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis' relatives in their East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens. Once booming socialites, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter--Big Edie and Little Edie--lost their wealth but clung to their house, their material possessions, and their idiosyncrasies. Little Edie also lost her hair to alopecia, thus the headscarf.
The plot of the movie is eh, which is probably due to its being adapted from a somewhat boring documentary, but two points make the movie unbelievably entertaining: the ridiculous and nonsensical things that come out of the characters mouthes in offensively thick New York accents, and the ridiculous and nonsensical things that the characters wear around their truly filthy living quarters.
While it may be a little insensitive to channel a seemingly bald crazy lady, Little Edie's ensembles are too good to throw into an asylum. Pieces that are crucial to channeling Drew Barrymore as Edie include a fur coat and/or a cape, a patterned dress with a turtleneck layered underneath it, and a head scarf. See below.
Joseph fur coat, Dolce & Gabbana cape, Rebecca Taylor dress, J.Crew turtleneck, Givenchy scarf
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